book of the day

by uzwi

A clear & useful bridge between science and the public is constructed in this empathic literary novel of a boy & how he comes to terms with his world. Explanations of everything from black holes to epigenesis demonstrate the author’s engagement with the scientific worldview, & act as the pivots of metaphors for a full range of human emotions & concerns. The total effect is one of numbing boredom, & of a mind which has carefully removed everything of excitement from its encounters with physics, cosmology & molecular biology. A Hay Festival version of the Popular Mechanics-style science fiction of the 1920s, this novel has a similar mission to educate its demographic–primarily 40/50-year-old reading-group members with a humanities degree. As a result, the very last thing its author has managed is to be, as his dustjacket claims, “boldly imaginative”. The most interesting thing about the book is its title, the literary referentiality & linguistic quirkiness of which promise more than they can ever deliver. [Imaginary Review, 2009.]

Recent English literary fiction about science was aimed at improving the reader in the worst possible way. Its attempts to impose a priest on a congregation–& not just a priest but a priest chosen from a farcically inappropriate demographic–were Edwardian in their pomposity. Why didn’t one see that? Never mind, Beatrice says: our duty now is to undermine the legacy of the 90s Science & the Arts movement by writing absolutely unscientific fiction. We have an immediate duty to explore, celebrate and riff off the virtues of trash. “Octopuses from outer space,” she says, “shamelessly bugger a young fermion in your street while the Old One looks on with a smile, dreamily having one of Einstein’s shoes. I don’t want to be a vicar nouveau. The fun goes out of it.” I tell Bea that she can’t be serious about this. She was never more serious. Her preferred fiction, she insists, would consist in a list of the most minor and unfortunate sexual peccadilloes of the great researchers, stitched together as a series of clues in a kind of giant Da Vinci Code of the scientific soul. She smiles reminiscently. “But perhaps written by Katharina Volckmer.” [Wish I Was Here, pp108/9, 2023.]